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Are other people as astonished as I am by this kind of thing, found on any social networking site any day of the year?

Fabulous news! My haiku ‘The last dollop’ has been accepted by poetry mag ‘Custard Trolley’ special haiku edition. I am so thrilled, you can’t possibly imagine! Custard Trolley is one of the most prestigious and longstanding poetry mags of its kind: vibrant, innovative, and welcoming to unpublished or little known writers such as myself. What’s more they charge only $20 per submission, so it’s a bargain! Thanks to all my friends and family who have encouraged me to carry on writing despite so many rejections over the years, my recent nervous breakdown, and the loss of our cat, Tibby. I couldn’t have done it without you all!

This garbage will usually be followed by fifty ‘likes’ and a score of encouraging remarks such as ‘keep on writing, Gerry!’; ‘Always knew you had it in you’; ‘Next the Nobel!’

Why? Why does anyone care? Not specifically about Gerry’s haiku, but about such things at large? Why such a torrent of praise and encouragement? Is there not too much stuff in the world, especially dodgy stuff, bad poetry being amongst the dodgiest stuff around? Am I being a killjoy? Does it matter? Should anyone get worked up about this? Why do I look at Facebook anyway?

Good question. There must be something in me that feels that I am like Gerry, that I am, in fact, a version of him, and he of me. This is all so awful I think I should probably be condemned to death, probably by stoning. Better still, should never open Facebook again.

On a lighter note, I find this among my files, though I have no idea from whence it comes. A small delight, reflecting perfectly my own attitude to reading.

Much as we should love to grasp things with a complete understanding, invariably we cannot bring ourselves to pay the high cost of doing so. From books all we seek is to give ourselves unlaboured pleasure: or if we do study, pursue only those branches of learning which deal with self-knowledge and which teach us how to live. This is the winning post towards which your sweating nag should canter. Never bite your nails or use the whip when you come across difficult passages in your reading: after making a charge or two, let them be. Nothing worthwhile is done without some gaiety: persistence and too much intensity dazzle the judgement, making it sad and weary.

Lydia Davis, in inimitable style, consolidates the elements of reading, writing and travel in a short piece from her 1997 collection, Almost no Memory: Michel Butor says that to travel is to write, because to travel is to read. This can be developed further: To write is to travel, to write is to read, to […]

More translation – literary and the other, everyday kind – and more thoughts on being a foreigner: “Foreigners are, if you like, curable romantics” writes Alastair Reid. “The illusion they retain, perhaps left over from their mysterious childhood epiphanies, is that there might be a place – and a self – instantly recognisable, into which […]

Continuing my readings of Alastair Reid, while travelling in Chile, I find the following: “The fictions we make are ways of ordering and dominating the disorders of reality, even though they in no way change it. The ‘truth’ of a fiction is less important than its effectiveness; and since reality is shifting and changing, […]

“Anonymity is peculiarly appealing to a foreigner: he is always trying to live in a nowhere, in the complex of his present.” With this thought in mind I come to the end of re-reading Alastair Reid’s essay, and start on the next one, called ‘Other People’s Houses.’ Despite the fact that to the outside world, […]

Staying for any extended period of time in a country where one is obliged to speak a language other than one’s own inevitably results in reflection about core identity. Core identity, if there is such a thing, presumes that there is an ideal and comfortable state of mind, in which one is most fully at […]

On Sunday we visit Los Colmillos de Chaihuín, which contain, among other trees, canelo, alerce (larch) and eucalyptus. The first two are indigenous, the last a moisture-hogging outsider, the villain of the piece in the local ecology, imported from Australia and now being slowly replaced by the older indigenous varieties. The eucalyptus grows very quickly […] […]

Many and varied are the approaches to translation, and numerous its unsought consequences. There are those who become obsessed by the process even at the cost of progressing to the end of a piece of work. It doesn’t matter: before very long, everything becomes an act of translation. So, after four days, we translate ourselves […]

At the bottom of all this sleeps a horse by Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011) At the bottom of all this sleeps a white horse, an old horse long in the ear, lacking in brainpower, worried by the situation, the pulse running through him is speed: the children mount him as if here were a […]

In a recent review of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, I learn that in a creation myth of the Yanomami people, the original world – the world that was here before – was “crushed by the collapse of the sky, hurling its inhabitants into the underworld. The exposed ‘back’ of the previous […]

Yesterday evening in my native town, or village, as I still think of it (although it has grown since my departure to something more town-sized), I went into the corner shop that I used throughout my childhood for buying sweets –fruit salads and blackjacks (four a penny); barley sugar sticks; and best of all, those […]

Ricardo Blanco

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Lydia Davis, in inimitable style, consolidates the elements of reading, writing and travel in a short piece from her 1997 collection, Almost no Memory: Michel Butor says that to travel is to write, because to travel is to read. This can be developed further: To write is to travel, to write is to read, to […]

More translation – literary and the other, everyday kind – and more thoughts on being a foreigner: “Foreigners are, if you like, curable romantics” writes Alastair Reid. “The illusion they retain, perhaps left over from their mysterious childhood epiphanies, is that there might be a place – and a self – instantly recognisable, into which […]

Continuing my readings of Alastair Reid, while travelling in Chile, I find the following: “The fictions we make are ways of ordering and dominating the disorders of reality, even though they in no way change it. The ‘truth’ of a fiction is less important than its effectiveness; and since reality is shifting and changing, […]

“Anonymity is peculiarly appealing to a foreigner: he is always trying to live in a nowhere, in the complex of his present.” With this thought in mind I come to the end of re-reading Alastair Reid’s essay, and start on the next one, called ‘Other People’s Houses.’ Despite the fact that to the outside world, […]

Staying for any extended period of time in a country where one is obliged to speak a language other than one’s own inevitably results in reflection about core identity. Core identity, if there is such a thing, presumes that there is an ideal and comfortable state of mind, in which one is most fully at […]